


Ever-blooming, never-blooming, side by side

by pseudofaux



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: F/M, Post-War, character death tag is for another character, early and earned, edelbert babby, living their early retirement, the quiet life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2020-06-19
Packaged: 2021-03-03 01:33:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24316609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudofaux/pseuds/pseudofaux
Summary: They have governed, and now they garden.(Written for Edelbert Week but I waaaaaaay missed the window. My fault. Damnation! I wanted to work with the prompt for Day 5:Flowers.)
Relationships: Edelgard von Hresvelg/Hubert von Vestra
Comments: 7
Kudos: 35





	Ever-blooming, never-blooming, side by side

They grow all sorts of things at the residence. Purposeful blooms for gravestones, flavorful plants for the kitchen, and also pleasant green things just because they make Edelgard smile that particular soft curve, tiny and mighty as a mint blossom. So much time is spent outdoors that they must try to remember to wear hats, because their hair is being lightened by midday sunshine, moonpearl to moonwhite, and black to... well. Hubert does not have a foolish inclination toward vanity, but the idea of grey rankles, somehow. So they wear the hats when they garden, unless they forget.

Even Emperors can earn freckles. That is something they will never forget, now.  
  
Hubert has learned about nonlethal plants in their gardening time. He has not yet thought of an appropriate way to share that her smile reminds him most of asphodel, because it is like a petal with an elegant curve on one side, and because they bloom in clusters. He will not explore the poetry of that thought beyond the most obvious meaning (what man does not want his wife's smiles to be plentiful?) because he is not a man given to poetry, and because the way to make her smiles happen is not to wallow in drivel.

Officially their cottage is "the residence", because it needed to be something on the imperial register and Hubert was not so free on time as to dream up a prettier name for the small estate. They found it when she was still Emperor, so anywhere they lived was the residence, and when they found it they did not want to live anywhere else. When she chose to abdicate, they chose to stay. It is the most modest of the places they have lived together, and they have made the grounds into objectively impressive gardens. Ferdinand would undoubtedly flutter all over them and then mull over how to improve his own grounds.

When Hubert thinks of Ferdinand, there's the silent wash of goosebumps on his arms. Perhaps it is good that instead of working himself into a conniption over landscaping, Ferdinand is embraced by the soil on the former von Aegir lands, where he has been since just after the war. It is one of the gentlest thoughts Hubert has ever had and when Edelgard whispered it aloud one night he liked to think it meant that they were both remembering him well, and accurately. They take the lushest peonies to Ferdinand's stone every year.

Peonies for Ferdinand, lilacs (from a bush there on the grounds long before they were) for Edelgard's father. These are the quietest trips they take. Mourning is a long and quiet process, for Edelgard and Hubert. They are alive to carry it out.

Growing is much louder, and they grow what Edelgard wants. They attempt the few things he wants to grow that she coaxes or cajoles him to admit, and the two she has stolen outright from their pillow time. Mostly herbs, he likes herbs well enough. They are not very far outside the wheelhouse he started with, and they flavor the food the two of them share. He has had some pleasant success with onions and garlic. And the mint. He can't help but grow it for her: mint is as quietly tenacious as it is sweet.

Edelgard prefers flowers, and she loves the flowers of the fruit trees best. It is a shame their season is short. His magic can keep dry boughs strong, but it cannot keep the life in things. So inside the residence there is the sweetness of dried flowers and artist's paper and the strange, wonderful smell of the baby, and outside there is a courtlike riot of fragrance in the early summer air. Hyacinths and roses and several clever flowers that open for the day and close for the night. When they are there at dusk, Hubert thinks the garden smells like peace. Her hand in his certainly feels that way.

They have grown all sorts of flowers, from seeds and bulbs and twisted tubers. Anything they came across, really. Only never, ever lilies.

Shortly after they knew she was pregnant, she declared they should try. They took a trip to a former palace gardener to buy bulbs, and when they returned home Hubert helped her move each one from paper parcel to soil. That night he stayed awake until he knew she was asleep by the way she mastered her fury and stopped shaking. The next day her smile was tight, but she was smiling. He would never forget a thing that troubled her, but they had been together so long by then that he knew it was right to let that be that.

The trappings and iconography of the church and its great liar belong to Edelgard by conquest. Those things have been left to their long-delayed, long-deserved ruin. If Edelgard wants to revive any of it, she is the only one fit to do so. All through autumn and winter and into early spring, the bulbs pull magic from cold ground and warm it into growing themselves by her hand. Their son is born late in the Lone Moon, the lone child in the world Hubert cares specifically for. The first time the baby is outside is the first night of the Great Tree Moon. It is also the first time they notice the lilies beginning to spear through the mulch, like spines of a green beast. But they planted the bulbs there, Edelgard and Hubert. The beast is there to please their family, and if it causes them grief, Hubert keeps their spades in excellent and sharp repair.

They spend time outside every day with the baby. Perhaps because so much gardening has gone on around him since he started growing, he'll be an accomplished herbalist one day. Hubert whispers solemn plant secrets to the child as he carries him close. They don't put the baby down often, which suits all of them just fine. Edelgard has not been shy to say how much she likes seeing him holding their son. And Hubert is most settled when the child is settled, warmly snuggled somewhere he can be protected. So they hold him often, and have picnic lunches on stacks of blankets under a tree beside their gardens, and watch the baby begin to learn where his hands are-- marvelous-- and gaze upon the world in his assessing way. One of their small staff shows Hubert and Edelgard how to wrap a length of cloth around their chests to make a sling for the baby to ride in, and it is well timed, because by then Hubert has had another birthday and they are halfway through the cycle of the Harpstring Moon, and they need all four hands to tend to their garden and their other tasks and pleasures.

Next month will be Edelgard's first birthday as a mother. Hubert needs to think of an appropriate gift. She is smiling so often that his favorite freckle is sometimes hidden by the rise of her cheek. He finds other favorites, and lets that be that. He wishes he had her talent with a brush; she's very worthy of being painted. There's a struggle in his tired, happy heart that he can't return her gifts of sketches with similar work.

He is thinking of presents for her one night as he prepares to sleep. It's dark in their room, and the baby is in his cradle by the bed. He sleeps for longer stretches now. Hubert is grateful for the thousandth time that there were no babies among their cohort during the war. At the time, he wouldn't have understood... and even if he had, he wouldn't have done anything differently. They achieved the greater good, and it's only because of that victory that the greatest good sleeps so nearby, tiny fists slack, round cheeks peaceful.

Hubert would have done worse, if he had known the potential of their future. He doesn't dwell on it, but it is a thing he knows, as dark and certain as magic. These thoughts swirl around his mind in the quiet, much like magic itself, and he is just beginning to clear his head to sleep when Edelgard slips out of their bed. He stays beneath the sheet with his eyes closed to give her what privacy she may need, but he hears her checking on the baby... and then locking the door behind her and not coming back.

He waits. It is not very long before there is a muffled, wounded sound, something snuffling in the flowerbeds closest to their room. He knows her throat too well to think some creature has emerged from the woods to terrorize their lawns. Pain is heavy on the night air. If she did not want him to know, she would not be audibly sobbing.

It takes less than a moment to be sure the only person sleeping in the room is securely swaddled and peaceful. Still, in the privacy of their home Hubert tends to linger over his child. It is a moment, perhaps a full moment, that he spends beside the polished wood of the cradle. And then he slips out of the room, too, and throws the hidden lock at the top of the fine Almyran doors that lead to the balcony.

Hubert does not care if their home qualifies as a cottage in any strict sense; he will live where she wants to live. He privately holds that the presence of a balcony stretches the definition, but he has far more important things to care about, and not for the first time he is grateful for the balcony attached to their bedroom. He can see her from it, her nightdress sullied by garden dirt. In the night, there is no need for a sunhat. But he can see that she has foregone gloves, too.

These days his knees sometimes betray him by cracking as he walks down stairs, but he is able to shimmy down a pillar with satisfying silence and speed. "Wife," he says softly at the edge of the dirt. When she turns, impossibly lovely as ever, he can see that her face is wet and her mouth twitches. Her eyes, however, are very still. They hold him in place as surely as an imperial brooch. Her beautiful, scarred knuckles are close to the ground, laced by lily stems. They cage her with a dark green that is nearly purple in the night, a poor attempt at the color of her eyes. She surpasses them in all things.

"They have to go," she says from behind her teeth. And that is not something that he must simply let be, that is something that _is_. So he kneels next to her and pulls up every remaining stalk while she watches. They tilled this soil together before the baby was born, and the bulbs have entrenched themselves well while winter made the world sleep. Hubert will dig them out with his teeth if he must. His hands are already filthy and the night's damp on the mulch has seeped through his trousers to his sometimes-creaky knees.

They don't creak now, there is no noise but his breathing. He knows there are owls near the edge of the forest that borders the grounds because he often hears them, but tonight they give him no more evidence than they would a doomed vole. The needle-thin sickle of the last Harpstring Moon is their only audience, practically a string itself. The von Martritz girl-- woman-- would have had a birthday recently. In the morning, it will be the month of Edelgard's birthday.

The soil does not want to give up the stems, but Hubert is more stubborn, more strong, more skilled. He cannot dislodge every bulb, but every plant is ripped from its foundation, and he has read that is enough to kill off young plants altogether. When he tears the last one up with a grunt, Edelgard sighs so mournfully he would take her by the shoulders if his hands were not filthy. Her nightdress is wet and dirty from the ground, but her shoulders are clean and he won't sully them.

She agrees to go back inside. He leads her by the hand (hers are dirty, too; they will both need to change and bathe, there is no sense denying it), boosts her onto the balcony, and follows her. He undoes the hidden lock at the top of the fine Almyran doors. Their baby sleeps peacefully, even as they wash their hands and legs and redress in clean nightclothes. Same slack fist, same soft cheek, the same marvelous little breaths. Hubert will make everything in the world let that be.

When they are back in their bed, she quietly thanks him and insists she will clean up the wasteland of lilies in the morning. Hubert insists she will not, not by herself, at least, and reminds her that whatever they do in the garden, they will do together. Wearing gloves. She falls asleep soon after, and he lets himself fall asleep as well, appreciating the way her hair smells like soil and strength. Their family is locked safe inside their room. There are no dragons emerging from the dirt. There are no dragons at all, any more. 


End file.
